I'm going to juxtapose two quite different photographs. At the top a photo by Menahem Kahana/AFP, with this caption:
Jerusalem, Israel: An Ultra-Orthodox Jew swings a chicken over his head during the Kaparot ceremony in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood. The Jewish ritual is supposed to transfer the sins of the past year to the chicken, and is performed before the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur.In this next photo, from Orange News, via Arbroath -
- a priest blesses manhole covers:
Town Hall officials have asked priests to bless all the manhole covers in their town to stop them being stolen by scrap metal thieves. Councillors in Lodz, Poland, replaced all 4,000 of the town's manhole covers after the new ones had been blessed at a church service to keep them safe.I'm not going to offer commentary except to emphasize that I'm not mocking (and I'll delete disrespectful commentary). Events like these, which elicit derision from nonbelievers, serve to demonstrate how powerful religion can be in the minds of those who are committed to their faith.
Interesting how people feel the need to protect religion. Heaven forfend we might be "disrespectful". I wouldn't deride the ceremonies, but rather the sensitivity of those involved when their ideas are challenged/criticised.
ReplyDeleteExactly! Respect is all religion calls for. After all, religious folks tend to be highly respectful of those who do not share their beliefs. :-S
Deletewould you not be offended if someone were to, say, speak disrespectfully of your mother? and if so, would you then be fairly described as being sensitive?
DeleteIt is not about religion. It is about spirituality. The world needs lots of wisdom now, specially now that we are abundant in knowledge, information and data. Unfortunately because of the left, we do not have any institution that provides us spirit and spirituality other than religion, we need it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I follow you. Are you suggesting that the left has in some way destroyed some alternative to religion that was there before?
DeleteAnd "wisdom" - how does this differ from making informed choices based on adequate data? What sources of guidance would you prefer - and what if someone disagreed with them?
I agree with "the world needs lots of wisdom now." Your statement about "the left" demonstrates just how badly we do need it- particularly in a time when so many actually believe that Adam and Eve roamed the planet 6,000 years ago together with the dinosaurs. It is organized religion itself that has replaced true spirituality, replaced it with the rituals and superstitions pictured above, and the bigoted, closed minded dogma that has kept us at each other's throats for millenia.
DeleteThe manhole cover thing is probably a worker safety ritual. The transfer of sin to the chicken is really interesting though! Reminds me of Afro-Caribbean religions a bit. Might go a long way back. Thanks for posting this!
ReplyDeleteAs a Jew who takes the Three Holy Weeks and the commandments surrounding them pretty seriously, I tend to perform a similar ritual: Every Rosh Hashanah (the week before Yom Kippur) I take a loaf of bread to the Platte River, put my sins into the bread through meditation, then toss pieces of bread into the river. Some of my sins probably wind up inside the pelicans and Canadian geese, but more simply float away.
ReplyDeleteAs far as blessing the man hole covers I wonder what conclusion people will reach when these new ones are stolen. I suspect it won't be that the protection didn't work. But how the events will be rationalized is interesting to examine. Yes, I am assuming it won't work.
ReplyDelete@ Saint Anarchist, I'm not sure how the left has done anything to remove religion or spirituality. As a non believer I don't really care what religion you practice, or how you go about doing it, so long as it doesn't involve trying to use it to control me. For example keeping schools from requiring prayer protects the non believers. Believers are still allowed to pray all they want (and I'm sure many do before tests). But to have a teacher require a moment to pray is an imposition on those of use who do not believe. I don't understand how many can not see that.
the conclusion to be drawn will be that some people not only ignore human prohibitions but also divine
DeleteWhat happens to the poor chicken?
ReplyDeleteMust be great being infused with evil spirits. All you can say is "Whatever, man". Just don't burn me alive, if you please.
I have come to the opinion that telling children that they will go to "hell eternal" after they die if they don't follow such and such rules constitutes child abuse and should be banned as barbaric. There must be evidence of crippling mental effects on people who were effectively brainwashed with this terrifying but obviously phony concept, right? It certainly has worked over the centuries to control people.
What fiendish person first invented and utilized this psychological terror device? Must have been many thousands of years ago...pre-fertile crescent? It's time to free so many poor homo sapiens from this yoke.
I cannot agree more with your comment on eternal damnation and its effects on the human psyche. It is obviusly phony and one of the most cruel jokes perpetrated on humanity.
Deleteyou can deny it, but you can't make it cease to exist by doing so.
DeleteYou can deny what? The existence of eternal punishment or the belief that such punishment exists?
DeleteRe: Chicken and Yom Kippur:
ReplyDeleteThe Bible makes many references to sacrifice.
The sacrifice of animals occurs from Genesis to the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), and then the sacrifices end.
Why?
Because, Jesus was the “lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” John 1:29
The people of the Old Testament confessed their sins over the beasts that were slain, and looked forward to the hour when Christ would sacrifice of Himself for mankind.
The people of the New Testament, and beyond (that includes you and me) look back to His sacrifice.
“For Christ suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh. 1 Peter 3:18
Sin has a price – death and separation from God. Christ bore that penalty on Himself for each one of us.
The Bible should be investigated (and I do mean investigated) in its entirety ….
2 Corinthians 5:
19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.
20 So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!”
21 For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.
Allow me the self-promotion: my $0.02 at my blog.
ReplyDeleteAllowed. And with my blessing, :.)
DeleteBTW, there are 237 posts in this blog tagged with "religion" -
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/search/label/religion
Depending on whether you're an old-timer who has already seen most of them, or a new visitor, you might find lots of stuff there that would interest you or be fodder for more posts on your blog. Explore - and hopefully enjoy.
Love the blog, BTW, been reading it for a good long time now. Though I doubt I've read all 237 (!) religion posts.
DeleteCheers.
If the old manhole covers get stolen, it's perfectly reasonable to bless the new ones.
ReplyDeleteIf revised manhole security precautions do not include anything in addition to the blessing, reasonable doesn't seem to be on the table.
I would think that placing a curse on the manhole covers, so that people who stole them suffered dire consequences, would work better then blessing them, but politicians being what they are, no doubt they didn't want to stir up trouble.
ReplyDeleteCould the manhole covers possibly be blessed in situ, so the non-believers among us don't fall in the sewer?
ReplyDelete...or at least temporary safety measures should be put in place while the blessing unfolds in a more ceremonial setting :)
DeleteManhole cover blessing in situ requires extensive traffic control, IMO.
These "blessings" seem very mild to me. I lived in Nepal in the late 90's, and during Dashain (also written Dasain), it is very common to have one's vehicle blessed with the sprinkled blood from the head of a sacrificed animal.
ReplyDeleteMore here: http://www.nepalhomepage.com/society/festivals/dashain.html
It didn't seem terribly shocking to me at the time, probably because I'd been raised on a steady diet of Old Testament. I was surprised to find out from many of my Nepali friends that they did not have any spiritual faith in the ritual but continued to participate because they felt it was "traditional" or would make their parents happy if they did so. It seemed more like a cultural superstition than a key part of their religious beliefs.